jakob nielsen on teenagers’ internet skills

Below is a little info about young folks’, er, I mean, the Google Generation’s internet habits. So we don’t have to worry that teenagers are the massively multitasking clickaholic freaks that we feared we have to keep up with? Now that’s a relief. Taken verbatim from Jakob Nielsen’s AlertBox email:

"GOOGLE GENERATION" STUDY CONFIRMS TEEN USABILITY FINDINGS

The British Library has released a report on what they call "The Google Generation" (i.e., teenagers - ironically, snappy report titles are bad for SEO performance).

Report (warning PDF file):

> http://www.bl.uk/news/pdf/googlegen.pdf

BL did log file analysis of the behavior of young users vs. grownups, and also did a longitudinal analysis of a variety of academic studies of information-seeking behaviors.

Their main conclusion is that teenagers are not as skilled users of the Web as many people think. In particular, teens have poor online research skills and a limited "vocabulary" of features they understand and use.

Broadly, these findings are identical to those of our own user research into how teenage users use websites. It's always nice when supplementary research confirms our findings, particularly when they use other methodologies that serve to triangulate the primary observational studies. The main difference is that we also provide actionable design guidelines for making your website suitable for young users.

Summary of the usability research:

> http://www.useit.com/alertbox/teens.html

finally found the pause button for iriver ifp 899 – sort of

Yes, I still use an iRiver IFP to record podcasts and other sounds on the go. It gives you very decent quality, doesn’t cost much, lets you use a line-in mic, and packs really small and light for those impromptu spur-of-the-moment recordings.

The iRiver’s biggest downfall: it is one of the most unintuitive devices you’ll ever struggle to use. Of the gazillion things you can do with it, I use about 2 or 3 – the ones I’ve more or less memorized the button clicking sequences for. That’s how unintuitive it is.

It took me over a year and a half to figure out how to pause playback. No kidding.

Today I hit peak frustration and went hunting for the manual (if you lose it, iRiver provides a downloadable pdf too). I was determined to find which click combination would allow me to listen to a recording and – imagine that – pause playback while listening!

I admit, I didn’t really figure it out myself. I gave up after 10 minutes, left the kitchen and the manual on the table, and headed for the office and the google search bar. Two minutes later I hear “hey! that’s how it works!” from the kitchen…

So, ehm, I’m told it’s right here in this other part of the manul: a settting under the General settings called Resume. Sooo, I set that to “on”. It’s still not a pause button. But it works just as well.

To pause, you turn off the device while listening. Then you turn it back on. When you turn it back on, it resumes where you left off.

Why should I expect the user manual to be any more user friendly than the device itself? Doh.

Is your website ineffective? find out, then do some hallway testing…

This introdcuction to finding out whether your website is ineffective comes from Vincent Flanders (Web Pages that Suck) via Kathy Sierra (Creating Passionate Users):

http://www.nonprofittips.com/is-my-web-site-ineffective-an-introduction/

From the same blog entry by Kathy, this site lets you submit a page for usability testing by other folks willing to take a look:

http://www.hallwaytesting.com/